Is there more to Carousel than meets the eye?
A scene from the original production of Carousel. From left to right: Iva Withers as Julie Jordan, Margot Moser (bent over) as Carrie, and Eric Mattson as Mr. Snow.
This year, Carousel celebrated the 80th anniversary of its Broadway premiere at the Majestic Theatre, opening to critical and commercial acclaim on April 19th, 1945 and proceeding to run for 890 performances. Its lush score and ambitious storytelling has cemented itself in the musical theatre canon, inspiring contemporaries of Rodgers and Hammerstein. For today’s musical writers, however, the plot is a mark of the problematic nature of the show as a whole.
Carousel follows the story of carousel barker Billy Bigelow and his relationship with millworker Julie Jordan. Billy is considered a low-life by the people of the close-knit town — he shouts when he speaks, mingles with the wrong crowd, and generally causes rifts in the community. Billy and Julie fall in love and have a daughter, Louise, but shortly before her birth, Billy gets involved in a botched robbery and commits suicide to avoid capture. Act Two follows his journey in the afterlife as he witnesses his daughter struggling with isolation and inherited trauma.
Throughout the musical, Billy verbally and physically abuses Julie. Even though her friends tell her that she should stay away with him, she continues to stand by his side:
Common sense may tell you
That the ending will be sad
And now's the time to break and run away
But what's the use of wond'rin'
If the ending will be sad?
He's your fella and you love him
There's nothing more to say
The abuse extends to a teenage Louise, who in a relationship of her own, tells her mother, “He hit me. But it didn’t hurt, Mother.” — a chilling echo of the cycle of abuse. Billy is portrayed not as the villain of the story, but as a wayward soul. He ends up meeting God — depicted as the Starkeeper — who offers him a chance at redemption by returning to earth for one day to try to help his daughter.
Eighty years ago, Americans were storming across Germany in the final weeks of the European theater of World War II. Allied forces had crossed the Rhine; concentration camps like Buchenwald and Dachau were being liberated, and the Battle of Okinawa was underway in the Pacific. Only three weeks after the premiere of Carousel, Germany would surrender to the Allied powers, marking the end of the war in Europe. Four months later, the war would end for good with the surrender of Japanese forces following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When Rodgers and Hammerstein were approached to create Carousel, they initially hesitated — it felt too bleak, too close to home in a world already grieving so much loss. Indeed, some audiences scoffed at Billy’s return to earth in Act Two, calling it “melodramatic escapism” (as noted in publications like Variety and The New York Times). But for those who had experienced wartime separation and grief, the finale, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, held a potent message of communal resilience and hope amid loss.
What's the Use of Wond'rin from the original production of Carousel, with Iva Withers as Julie Jordan
The reality of war impacted veterans who spent months and years preparing for the brutality of combat. The psychological toll, then known as “combat fatigue”, extended from the battlefield to the home. Studies from the Veterans Administration in the late 1940s documented increased domestic violence and family estrangement among returning soldiers. Public reporting on domestic abuse was nearly nonexistent; divorce carried a heavy stigma, and women were expected to endure hardship silently for the good of the family and community. There are stories we will never hear of women waiting for their young husbands to return as war heroes, only to find them haunted, distant, or violent. As Julie sings, “Something made him the way that he is.”
The portrayal of abuse in Carousel is rightfully upsetting, especially in a world where we encourage survivors to speak about their experiences. But we cannot pretend we can ignore it as a plotpoint in the musical and have it be the same. The carousel itself is a metaphor for the cyclical nature of trauma and abuse — a constant spinning of lives, mistakes, and consequences. In the final moments, the Starkeeper’s repairman returns to fix the carousel, symbolically offering the chance to break or perpetuate these cycles. We are never given a reason for Billy’s violence — the “something” is never named. But it’s possible Carousel was unintentionally reflecting a grim new reality that some veterans and families faced in the aftermath of war.
Eighty years later, Carousel’s mark on theater is undeniable. But it’s also a time capsule, a reflection of postwar America — and a reminder of the stories we haven’t told about what happened to those who came home.
